Special Feature: Picturebook Reviews and Recommendations by Peter Neumeyer

AGE GUIDES: these are approximate recommendations:

• Picturebooks, 3-6 years old (though often enjoyed by older children, too)

REVIEWERS: Peter Neumeyer

* denotes San Diego writer and/or illustrator
** Age levels, when provided by the publishers, are included in the bibliographical information. Otherwise, category placements are our best approximations.

 

	Picturebook Reviews and recommendations by Peter Neumeyer, Professor Emeritus English Dept., SDSU; Founding Member, National Center for the Study of Children’s Literature, SDSU; Boston Globe book reviewer; author of The Annotated Charlotte’s Web
Burton, Virginia Lee. The Little House (board book). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009, 1942. $7.99. Ages 3 to 6. Carroll, Lewis, ill. Rodney Matthews. Alice in Wonderland. Templar Books, an imprint of Candlewick Press, 2009. $24.99. Ages 9 and up. Field, Eugene W. ill. Giselle Potter. Wynken, Blynken, and Nod. Schwartz and Wade Books, 2008. $16.99. Ages 3 to 7. McCloskey. Robert. Make Way for Ducklings. Viking, 1941, 1969. $17.99. Ages 4-8. Sami. The Big, Bigger, Biggest Book. Blue Apple Books, 2008. $14.95. Ages 2-5. Schallau, David. Come Back Soon. Houghton Mifflin Books for Children, 2009. $17.00. Ages 6 to 10. Smee, Nicola. Clip-Clop. Boxer Books, 2003. $12.95. Ages 2 to 5. Williams, C. K., illustrated by Stephen Gammell. How the Nobble was Finally Found. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009. $18.00. Ages 6 to 10.
	Burton, Virginia Lee. The Little House (board book). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009, 1942. $7.99. Ages 3 to 6. McCloskey. Robert. Make Way for Ducklings. Viking, 1941, 1969. $17.99. Ages 4-8. In the past couple of years, some fine books from the golden years of the 1940's have been reissued, and so now we’re blessed once again with two former Caldecott winners–Robert McCloskey’s Make Way for Ducklings (1941) and Virginia Lee Burton’s classic The Little House (1942). Robert McCloskey executed some grand historical murals for the WPA, the blessed and sorely missed government program that employed painters and writers in the 1930's, enriching the artistic expression of this country in breadth, if not always in depth, as never before or since. Perhaps from experience rendering epic actions vividly on court house walls, McCloskey became master of the telling gesture and the fast and essential plot line. And so in Make Way for the Ducklings he tells the mesmerizing mini-epic of Mrs. Mallard. Having scouted out the congenial Boston Garden lake, but finding the urban environs too chaotic for brooding, she and her husband, Mr. Mallard, settle their eight eggs on a small island in the nearby Charles River. After eight ducklings have hatched, Mrs. Mallard, with help of Michael, Clancy, and four more Boston traffic cops, single file back to the Boston Garden, where henceforth they settle on a little island on the lake, and follow the Swan boats and eat the peanuts tossed at them. So famous do they become that by now McCloskey’s fictionalized ducklings have become immortalized as bronze statuary greeting the visitors to The Garden. McCloskey’s mastery of unambiguous expression and gesture, even in a duck, make for uproarious humor in the world of a preschooler, and for nostalgic reminiscence in the mind of reading parent. Make Way for Ducklings should indeed be reintroduced to each generation of American children. Virginia Lee Burton’s The Little House (1942 Caldecott winner) may be about the shapeliest illustrated story ever devised for the very small. The book, including this slightly smaller board version, is written and designed as one artistic whole–what the Bayreuth Richard Wagner aficionados call a Gesammtkunstwerk–a work of art in which text and illustration echo each other in tone and mood, from the plot itself all the way down to color, line, and angle. In short, the Little House, animated with windows for eyes and the front stairs as mouth, watches the seasons pass. Then, sometime in the 19th century, a family with children moves in. The family is active and happy, and the house smiles as trees grow in the countryside, life flourishes, and the seasons turn. As time passes, more people arrive, but now no longer in horse-drawn carriages, but in automobiles. A steam shovel digs up the soil, other houses are built, the years pass and the houses now become multi-story tenements. The originally merry colors become murky, brown and gray, and the stars once seen in the night sky are now obliterated as the air is filled with dust and smoke, and gray-black rail lines bisect the page. The little house is crowded between high-rises, scrunched under the tracks, broken windowed and now distinctly no longer smiling with its front porch. The seasons follow one-another, Spring comes again, and now along comes the great-great-granddaughter of the man who first built the Little House. The little house reminds her of stories she had heard–she learns it’s the house her grandmother had lived in. She buys it again, and the Little House is loaded onto a trailer and again hauled out into the countryside–where the sky is yellow-gold, the trees are in blossom, and the grass is green. Once again, children are playing, the leaves blow, the sun and the moon which we had first seen in the opening pages once more go through their cycles, and on the last page, the Little House sleeps contentedly on the round earth, under the vault of the night sky. Even the text follows the music as, in the opening and closing pages it seems to adapt itself more gracefully to the curvature that, for Burton, signifies all things wholesome, feminine, life-giving, generative, as against the staccato angularity of the urban dissonance of the book’s middle. The Little House seems a fine choice for the board book medium, for it is a book worth reading and rereading, a book worth growing into, if we accept the sensible postulate of John Locke, that early aesthetical impression quite literally will make its mark on a child and leave a lasting inclination for The Good.
	Carroll, Lewis, ill. Rodney Matthews. Alice in Wonderland. Templar Books, an imprint of Candlewick Press, 2009. $24.99. Ages 9 and up. Ever since the original copyright expired in 1907, a sort of ultimate task that illustrators have set as a test for themselves is to do the pictures for Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). From the beginning, they have felt it difficult to escape from the inspired influence of the original illustrator, John Tenniel, who so brilliantly set the bar very high–so high, in fact, that because of Tenniel’s dissatisfaction with the printing, Carroll, had the entire first edition scrapped. At the time of composition, Carroll, or by his proper name, Lewis Dodgson, had executed his own engaging illustrations for the companion volume, Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, which he intended to give personally to Alice Liddell, the little girl who had been the occasion for the original telling, and who had been the model for Alice in the story, if actually not for the illustrations. Illustrating “Alice” challenges artists in the same way that scaling Anapurna beckons mountain climbers. Among the most famous illustrators, we count Arthur Rackham (1907) and Mervyn Peake (1947) in Great Britain, and in America, Willy Pogany (1929), a limited edition by Salvador Dali (1969), and a startling and at times thoroughly frightening one by Barry Moser in 1982. For that matter, a number of the editions, such as Ralph Steadman’s 1973 version, are also frightening–perhaps for a reason not hard to find. Depending on the perspective from which one approaches the tale of Alice, and even depending somewhat on one’s own natural disposition, the story itself of this venturesome and outspoken little girl contains indubitable and explicit terrors. The aplomb with which brave young Alice faces down these terrors is distinctly a part of her memorable persona. It’s one of the reasons she is an admirable heroine. Comes now another new edition elegantly boxed, but once again mistitled Alice in Wonderland, illustrated by the British commercial artist and science fiction and fantasy illustrator, Rodney Matthews, whose monstrous shapes for the creatures Alice encounters bespeak the artist’s own early inclination to science. The forms and shapes that Matthews has summoned up are profoundly threatening in their nightmarish evocations and their fecund organicism. That’s not bad in this instance, for the book could suggest as much. And living in a world of such terrors may well account for the hollow-eyed and emaciated state of Matthews’s rendition of Alice. In a brief foreword, Mathews acknowledges the influence of Walt Disney, and alerts us to the fact that here, in his own version, Matthews has ingeniously moved between scenes viewed “macro” and in “telephoto.” Along with the Disney influence, one may certainly find intimations of Bruegel or the 15th century virtuoso of horrific apparitions, Hieronimus Bosch. Indubitably the perception of Alice’s world by Matthews is eminently skilled, plausible, and worthy, if not exactly charming. And the original text of Lewis Carroll’s early monument in the field of nonsense fiction is retained intact in this volume. So, if you already own one edition featuring the original 1865 Tenniel woodcuts, this new version by Rodney Matthews could well become another item in your collection of “Alices.”
	Field, Eugene W. ill. Giselle Potter. Wynken, Blynken, and Nod. Schwartz and Wade Books, 2008. $16.99. Ages 3 to 7. If it is still your hope that you may lull a child to sleep with honeyed bedtime susurrations from a book, you may be a likely consumer of Giselle Potter’s engaging new illustrations for Eugene W. Field’s 120-year-old bedtime fantasy, Wynken, Blynken, and Nod. Evocatively, even mystically, illustrated, the story lends itself to lands between sleeping and waking. The mysterious narrator (who could be, but is not necessarily, the “mother”) explains that the eponymous protagonists are, in fact, “two little eyes”–Wynken, Blynken–and the “little head” is Nod. These three characters sail off one night in a wooden shoe--actually, the “shoe” is their “trundle bed,” the narrator explains–a small bed on casters that can be rolled under another bed. The charm and originality of the short poem lie in the romantic imagery and the much more ambiguous notions that these images may evoke. We actually see the river “of crystal light” on which the children set forth, and we are told and shown that it becomes a boundless “sea of dew.” The suggestion that we are sailing into a dream is reinforced by the trace of an actual gauzy night curtain that is echoed in the sail of the wooden boat. At the same time, curiously, the “herring“ that the three catch, we are also told, are the night stars themselves–this strange duplicity well captured here by the illustrator. And in the morning, the little wooden boat is brought home from its strange trip, “so pretty a sail....as if it could not be.” But actually, the “pretty sail” actually did happen, for here now lies the little boy in his bed, clutching to himself one of the herring for which the three had been fishing. Are the two herring in bed with the boy his actual fish toys to accompany the toy elephant, ball, and sail boat we’re looking at? Or are these two herring magical mementoes actually retrieved from dream voyage–as in Chris Van Allsburg’s The Polar Express? Where did Wynken, Blynken, and Nod really go–what, in fact, was this sea in the night where “the herring” are the stars? The story is stranger than, at first, it seems.
	Sami, The Big, Bigger, Biggest Book, Blue Apple Books, 2008. $14.95. Ages 2-5. So much for two gems from the golden 1940's. A contemporary book that most successfully replicates the thoughtful design of those years is Sami’s Big, Bigger, Biggest, a wonder of folding and unfolding paper which, in curious metaphorical fashion, echoes the conceptual unfolding that transpires in a three-year-old brain. In bright, bold colors, with a retro font and illustrations evocative of the past, each page unfolds to picture, first, the normative ideas, “far,” “fast,” “deep,” “long,” etc. Then, if you unfold the flaps, each page will reveal the comparative–“farther,” “farthest,” or “faster,” “fastest.” Harriet Ziefert’s sparse text, provides a logical but unobtrusive scaffold for bold-colored, dynamic illustrations giving the sharp edged illusion of collage. “Long,” “longer,” “longest,” is rendered with a beautifully stylized, knock-your-eyes-out red fire truck #5, from which three (mixed ethnic) fire fighters unroll a bright yellow hose, which, of course, illustrates its extension with each fold-over flap. For other comparison, the seemingly-simple interplay of the pages is, in fact, remarkably artful, so that, for example, “short,” shorter, “shortest,” are three increasingly diminutive human figures in fold-outs, while the verso (back pages) of the foldout make their own reverse commentary in numbers. It looks so simple! But in fact, the book is a brilliant mini-construction of color and spatial ingenuity. Just try (I did!) making a folded paper version of a book like this yourself.
	Schallau, David. Come Back Soon. Houghton Mifflin Books for Children, 2009. $17.00. Ages 6 to 10. From Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, to Jean De Brunhoff’s The Story of Babar, or Frank L. Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, or Dino Buzzati’s The Bears’ Famous Invasion of Sicily, and Tove Jansson’s Moominland, entire fictional universes, made to scale and complete in every detail, have been created by daring writers. Now comes Daniel Schallau, whose country of Icetown in Come Back Soon warrants inclusion in any inventory of great lands of the literary imagination. For me, Come Back Soon is the high point of this picture book season. Icetown, a land inhabited by penguins, is an imposing architectural fantasy, splendid with a new ice hotel, designed in all its elaborate detail by Elephant, “Architect L.L.P.” ( i.e. Limited Liability Partnership).” Mayor Guin (all penguins share the common surname, Guin) and the inhabitants of the snow metropolis have invited Elephant back to celebrate his creation. The invitations go out by fishmail and are delivered worldwide by “postwhales.” Schallau has devised a penguin land of almost infinite detail and variety, in which the pachydermal architect, after his long sea voyage, is invited out for sushi by his grateful clients. As in the rest of this deceptively simple, actually extremely complex, book, every architectural detail, and every little penguin who may have appeared earlier in the book, persists in its own designated place, to render its own contribution to the intricate whole. In the sushi parlor, the penguins sit on their individual stools, whereas mammoth Elephant necessarily occupies two at once. On the wall hang the parlor’s fishy offerings—salmon, tuna, plankton, dumplings, squid, and all else you could imagine. And because this sushi parlor is at the “bottom” of the world, the covers for the lanterns on the ceiling appropriately sport images of the earth viewed “upside down,” as though you were looking up from the space below the Antarctic, the planet spinning topsy-turvy above you. After Elephant and attending penguins bed down for the night, in the underwater portion of the island, a merry and cosmopolitan nightlife continues, even as whales drift in and out of openings, stopping for refreshments at “whale stops,” and float away with loads of squid and tuna. In the morning, Elephant and all the penguins wash faces and brush tusks. Then, as he’s riding the giant snowball that’s the preferred mode of transportation, things suddenly go awry for Elephant. The snowball goes haywire, and Elephant plows into the penguin-shaped top of the hotel, which breaks off, and elephant and snowball and hotel top are adrift at sea. In less than a week, however, with all the penguins harmoniously mobilized and the architect doing his part, all is again rebuilt. Penguins present Elephant with a giant snowball gift, and he sails for home, knowing he is always welcome back in the land of the penguins. In subtle fashion, the elaborate and crowded panorama of Icetown and its inhabitants is duplicated and compounded by the artist’s ingenious rendering of an entire secondary universe, not only in the sub-aquatic elaborations of the terrestrial world above, but also in the dancing shadows—icy blue in penguin-land—which, as in some Platonic cave parable, are cast not only on primary objects but against the wintry sky itself. It’s an ebullient story made even loopier by the elaborate paintings which, if you really take the trouble to work out the geography and topography and perspective, will reward you with a coherent understanding of this kindly and intricate land dreamed up in its creator’s exuberant imagination. Not least among its features, like all the great literary alternative civilizations I’ve cited at the outset, Come Back Soon does not take place in a societal vacuum. Relationships among fellow creatures in David Schallau’s mini-panorama display a distinguishing civil courtesy and rationality that suggests itself as a norm for thriving commerce in a modern land.
	Smee, Nicola. Clip-Clop. Boxer Books, 2003. $12.95. Ages 2 to 5.   Clip-Clop is that distinguished thing, the exemplary picture book that lulls the unknowing reader astray by its syncopated perfection, seemingly simply, yet in fact exhibiting a complex dance of story, illustration, and typography. The book evolves in three simple actions: there’s Mr. Horse, and then there’s cat, dog, pig, and duck, each of which, in sequence, wants to go for a ride on the horse. By mid-book they’re all on top of Mr. Horse, who is galloping faster and faster–going from “Clip-Clop” to "Clippity-cloppity” till all the riders yell “Whoa! Stop!” and Horse skids to a halt and all the riders sail off into a hay stack. Mr. Horse expresses some concern, but cat, dog, pig, and duck cry AGAIN in loud bold capital letters, and off they go again, cat, dog, pig, and duck, “Clip-clop, clippity-clop!” What could be a bigger thrill. My enthusiasm is unabated.
	Williams, C. K., illustrated by Stephen Gammell. How the Nobble was Finally Found. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009. $18.00. Ages 6 to 10.   Pulitzer Prize winning poet, C. K. Williams and Caldecott winner, Stephen Gammell make a formidable team as they create the fantastical little “something,” the Nobble–an airy creature who plays in snowflakes and naps on the bottom rung of the number eight. Even though the Nobble is over 4,000 years old, he has never bumped into anybody else at all, and nobody has ever found him since he loiters in such unlikely places as the space between Wednesday and Thursday. So the Nobble is lonely, and he cries in his sleep, and sometimes wonders whether he might not just be himself having a dream about himself. And he thinks maybe in another dream he’d be somebody who didn’t live quite as much alone as now he did. When the Nobble ventures forth into our world, he encounters great square boxes–buildings–and scary noise making creatures–dogs and cats–and then, of all things, a little girl–a little girl who shouts at him “why don’t you pick up the phone?” And that’s where this book becomes different, magical, and in a class by itself. This magic lies in the language, the off-base originality–why would the girl want to talk to Nobble on a phone? And when the Nobble hears himself knocking at the door, what he says is “Where when” or “How so?” or “Is why?” The little girl introduces the Nobble to another Nobble and the two are delighted to discover one-another. The meeting marks an end to their loneliness, and they’re grateful to the little girl–but now they want to depart, and so what does one say when must leave someone else? Do you say “How before” or “here when” or “If whether”–no, the little girl tells the two Nobbles, “just say ‘Goodbye’.” And so both Nobbles say “Goodbye. Little girl,” and then guess that what should follow is a greeting to each other: “Hello Nobble,” and then the other Nobble says “Hello Nobble, to you.” And once author, Williams, is off on one of these crazy riffs of linguistic non-sequiturs, there’s no stopping him–and the somewhat touching story of the Nobble becomes poetry. Nonsense poetry, but clearly, poetry, which in genuine form may be just about the rarest genre in children’s books today. Five thumbs up for the Nobble, who lives in the illustrator’s ink-spattered and wildly propelled Gamellian universe. Runny paint, splashes and splotches, scruffy-headed creatures–these could all be unsettling, except that the inherent sweetness of the Nobbles themselves makes their bug-eyed, not really human, oddity somehow, in spite of themselves, quite endearing.